National and regional language diversity / Stanley Lieberson.

This paper presents several theoretical propositions about the relationship between linguistic diversity within a nation and within its subparts or regions. The propositions described are equally valid for the relationships between any area unit and its component parts and may thus be applied to a city and its districts or to a province and its counties. The "A" index (a quantitative measure of mother tongue diversity proposed by Greenberg in 1956) gives the probability of randomly paired inhabitants of a given country having different mother tongues. The advantage of this measure is that it permits quantitative description of the degree of mother tongue diversity existing in a given area as well as allowing for comparison between areas. The author feels it crucial to recognize that any concentration of a minority language in a region will be more likely to lower mother tongue diversity in the region if the nation has a relatively high level of diversity to begin with. These findings also illustrate how extremely diverse nations can survive, ignoring questions of bilingualism among the native speakers of lesser tongues and the existence of "lingua francas." this paper is to be published in the "acts of the 10th International Congress of Linguistics" by the Academy of the S.R. of Romania in 1968. (amm)

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